Social video service Zoopy, often referred to as SA’s version of Google’s YouTube, has decided to take its business in a new direction.

As of today, the company no longer accepts user-generated video uploads and will instead turn its focus to creating its own content, mainly geared for playback on mobile phones.

Zoopy CEO Jason Elk says the decision to turn away from offering a YouTube-type service took months to make. “People are really settled into their video upload service of choice, and that is YouTube,” he says.

Zoopy could have spent R100m trying to become the YouTube of SA, but it was never really what the business had aimed to be, Elk says.

Since its launch, Zoopy has featured both user-generated content and its own material through a service known as Zoopy TV. Elk says that over the last few years, the number of people watching Zoopy-generated video content has soared while the number of those uploading their own content has dwindled.

Elk says the decision to focus exclusively on Zoopy generating its own content is also a means of staying relevant. He says the company does not want to end up in the same boat as MySpace, which fell out of favour when users flocked to Facebook instead.

Having two segments to the business has also proved challenging. “Every time we do any development or change anything, we have to do it for both services. The two segments have grown in different directions and it was time to chose focus.”

Elk says he wants Zoopy to create a “living archive of the African experience”. And to reach a mass market, the service will be pitched as a “video infotainment platform” for mobile phones. “More than 20m South Africans own Web-capable phones,” says Elk.

Zoopy’s plan is to provide video snippets of events, news and other content relevant in the African context. “We will be able to do this without any restrictions,” says Elk.

For Zoopy, it means monetising its service properly, since it will own its content and can advertise around that content accordingly. “This is something we couldn’t really do with the user-generated content,” says Elk.

Each video will be between 2MB to 3MB in size, or about 90 seconds long. Mobile subscribers will pay for the data consumed to download videos, and costs will depend on the mobile operator being used.

However, Elk says according to Zoopy’s calculations, it will cost on average 30c/MB to access videos on the site. — Candice Jones, TechCentral